Review: The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend - Katarina Bivald

I randomly picked this up at the library, because it was marked as “something like Jojo Moyes” and I was in the mood for something lighthearted and easy. 

The book is about a young woman, Sara, from Sweden, who is pen-pals with an elderly lady from Broken Wheel, a small town in USA. They both love books and this is how they became acquainted. They decide that Sara should come visit her, but while Sara is traveling, Amy, the elderly lady dies. Sara decides to stay on in the town anyway, as she hasn’t got anything to do back home, and to keep herself busy she opens a bookshop with all of Amy’s books. The townsfolk decided that they like her and Sara really likes it there too, so the townsfolk get up a crazy plan to get her to stay with them. 

This book was okay. It was certainly lighthearted and easy, but perhaps a little too much so. Sara reminded me of myself, but even so I had a hard time connecting to her. The same goes for pretty much everyone else in the book too. I found the most interesting character to be George, the local recovering alcoholic. It felt like he was the only one with substance to him, the others just felt like flat cardboard cut-outs with just enough characterization to work for the story. 

The plot itself was pretty uninteresting. Apart from George’s story there was really only the story of Sara and the bookshop interspersed with a bit of small-town life. Backstory of the characters were hinted at, but nothing more, and I felt like the whole plot was just scratching the surface, like there was way more to tell about the small town and the fates of the people there, the impact of the economic recession and why some people left and others stayed, and what was expected in the future. But as I said this book only scratched the surface and developed anything if it was directly related to the plot of Sara and the bookstore. 

I gave this 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. It was fine, but nothing more, and I definitely think that there are better “lighthearted, easy reads” out there.